Grace and Glorie opens Rosebud Theatre season
By Laureen F. Guenther Times Contributor
Rosebud Theatre’s 2022 season is soon opening with a play about an unusual friendship between a frail elderly woman and her naïve big city volunteer. Grace and Glorie is set to take the stage at Rosebud’s Opera House stage starting April 1.
“Grace & Glorie is the story of an old, illiterate, rural woman who lives in a little cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains,” said Morris Ertman, Rosebud Theatre’s artistic director in an email.
Norma Roth plays Grace, who has been diagnosed as palliative and was released from hospital to live the rest of her life at home. Her palliative care volunteer is a big city lawyer who doesn’t know how to light Grace’s wood stove or care for her livestock, much less care for a woman “who is as cantankerous as she is old.”
In the set around Grace’s cabin are the sounds of a developer get closer to tearing down Grace’s apple orchard and her farm.
“(Grace is) salty, she calls it as she sees it. She was raised to face the problem with rugged strength and unending grit,” said Roth in an email. She holds rock hard strength and frail loss. As an audience, we get to watch … (who) Grace was and who she has become. That’s both hilarious and heart-rending.”
And to Gloria, Ertman said Grace becomes “a grandmother and friend whose rural wisdom not only keeps her on her toes while the audience laughs but helps her understand her own fraught relationship with her husband.”
“From the moment she enters, Gloria is out of her element,” said Sarah Robinson, who plays Gloria, in an email. “We get to see her responding and learning, as well as failing as she tries to engage and operate within a world that is foreign in her. … By the end of this play, Gloria learns to hope again. She learns that life, love and healing are maybe possible in the midst of devastation and there is new growth to be found.”
“It’s a story about an intergenerational friendship of two strong women who are resilient,” said David Snider, the show’s director, in an email. “The deep rapport that the artists share from working together over a number of years will permeate the storytelling.”
Snider and Ertman both said the play has important lessons for us, since the pandemic has sharpened our awareness of the need to care for our elders.
“Listen closely to your elders,” said Snider. “Even if they tell you they have nothing remarkable to say.”
“How do we treat the elderly with value,” said Ertman. “How do we value and respect their insight? How do we enable their dignity and independence? This play illustrates something of that.”
Grace and Glorie runs April 1 to May 28. Tickets may be purchased with or without a gourmet meal. Get tickets or more information at 1-800-267-7553 or rosebudtheatre.com.
“The best way to heal our need for coming together is to do so with story,” said Ertman adding that patrons will be asked to remain masked to curb any nervousness of those wishing to catch the show.